Wake Up
by mewandmewtworock
Summary: "Outside. It was a place so unfamiliar to me. But it wasn't strange, it was completely normal, which was in itself strange." Chell has escaped from Aperture, well at least that's what she thinks. So why does it seem that it never existed?
1. Outside

Outside.

It was a place so unfamiliar to me. But it wasn't strange, it was completely normal, which was in itself strange. I was in a cornfield, a large cornfield that was perfectly kept and tended to. With nothing but my clothes and my old charred companion cube, and she expected me to survive in this world. Or maybe I could, I had no idea what the world was like now, I didn't know how long I'd been in Aperture.

"Excuse me, are you okay?" Someone asked me, I turned to look at them, they were just a normal looking person wearing normal looking clothes. I opened my mouth to talk but my brain stopped myself. After years of it I was just used to keeping my mouth shut.

"Would you like to come inside? Feel free to bring your... cube." She offered. Her voice intrigued me. It was GLaDOS's voice, I was sure of it, just human. I picked my companion cube up and walked beside her as she took me to a house I assumed.

"So what were you doing in the middle of my farm?" She asked as we walked.

"I came out of the shed." I managed to force words out of my mouth. My own voice confused me, I was not at all used to hearing it.

"There's nothing in that shed. Are you alright?" She sounded concerned. Something else I wasn't used to. She also thought me a lunatic, something I was used to. We arrived at a small farm house and went inside. It was so cosy inside. I wished it was my house.

"My name is Chell." I blurted out randomly. She smiled at me and turned a kettle on.

"I'm Gladys, don't laugh. I love your name, I wish I had something a bit more... modern." Gladys sighed. It was too much of a coincidence, she had the exact same voice, albeit less robotic and similar name to GLaDOS. It frightened me somewhat.

"Is that cake?" I quickly diverted my thoughts. Unsuccessfully I might add. It was cake, delicious looking cake. I sat down at a table in the kitchen where Gladys was doing something with cups and the kettle. After a few minutes she set a cup down in front of me which was filled with some sort of liquid.

"It's tea. Do you want sugar with it?" She politely explained to me. I nodded and she put a spoonful of sugar into the cup for me. I picked the cup up and took a sip from it, burning my tongue in the process. Gladys laughed kindly, as though I were a child. I felt like a child. I wouldn't mind her as my mother, she seemed so kind.

"So, let's get to the bottom of this. You came out of my shed? How long had you been in there?" She waited for her tea to cool down. I simply shrugged. "Can you give an estimate?"

"Twenty years maybe. I don't know." I answered. She looked stunned. How could she not know what was in the shed? Had she never opened it?

"Well, this just got weird." Gladys tried to wrap her head around my reply. "What is "Aperture"?" She asked, looking at the writing on my t-shirt.

"It's a science thing." Was the best explanation I could give. I wasn't even sure if it was the right explanation. Prison might've been better.

"I know, show it to me. In a minute of course, just relax for the moment." She decided. I drank my tea once it had cooled down. It tasted nice and warm. We left the house after that and walked all the way to the shed. I was nervous when I was about to open the door. I grabbed the handle and pulled on it.

"It's... empty. How... no. No, no it can't be possible. There was a whole facility down there, it went down for miles, it was massive. It can't have just gone." I stood inside it, looking around for a switch or something. I went on the floor and looked for a trap door, there had to be one.

"Chell, calm down. There has never been anything in there. You... you don't have anything wrong with you, do you?" Gladys put her hand on my shoulder. I flinched at the touch.

"No, no not at all. I-I it has to be there, I spent my whole life there. It can't just disappear!" I started to get hysterical. Gladys placed two hands firmly on my shoulders and pulled me out of the shed and closed it. She stared straight at me, not moving, like a rock.

"Chell, just calm down." Was all she said to me before she had to drag me back to the house and sit me down on a sofa. I couldn't think of anything that could've happened. And then my mind just blanked. It was as if my thoughts had overloaded and my brain had reset itself to stop it from shutting off.

"_Well then work harder you stupid robots." _I heard GLaDOS's, the real, robotic one say. I looked around. Gladys wasn't in the room. Was I just imagining it? It seemed so real though. I picked up a newspaper from a coffee table and looked at the date. It was 2013. No, it had to be later than that. I read through the stories, hoping to find something about a massive underground facility suddenly disappearing, or something about Aperture.

I found absolutely nothing. It was as if it never existed to anyone but me. But it was definitely real. The physical and mental torture I endured had to be real. Gladys re-entered the room, smiling at me now that I'd calmed down.

"I've set something up for you so you can sleep, you look tired so why don't you just go up now? Maybe it'll help you think about things. I've got some things to attend to." Gladys suggested. I had nothing better to do so I let her lead me to what was now my bedroom. It was small but I liked small things, especially after being inside Aperture. The walls were a light shade blue and the carpet was white. I felt peaceful just being inside the room.

"Thank you. It's lovely." I said sincerely to Gladys. She smiled somewhat triumphantly and then left me on my own. I also noticed that she'd brought my companion cube up into the room. It was the only proof I now had that Aperture was real apart from my memories. I decided I would just go to sleep, I felt tired and I honestly couldn't remember ever sleeping, properly that is. I wondered what it was like to dream.

It turned out dreaming felt like being electrocuted.

I woke up in the middle of the night after I couldn't take it anymore. I looked out of the window, which I realised I hadn't closed the curtains for. The moon made me feel sad and angry. I wondered whether because Aperture was gone here, Wheatley would be too. I spent a while just looking at the stars, from here they seemed so small and insignificant, just bright lights in the sky. But they were so much more.

"_You... you did your best."_ I heard GLaDOS's voice say again. And once again I had no explanation for what could be happening. I wanted to convince myself it was my imagination and try and live a normal life. But I almost knew that it was real, and not just in my head. It had to be real. It had to.


	2. Falling

There was a knock at my door, I didn't respond, I was transfixed by the sky. It was daytime now and the sky was completely grey, not blue like it had been yesterday. I heard the door open and then close again.

"_Sorry, uh Chell, didn't mean to disturb you."_ Wheatley's voice said. I froze. It couldn't possibly be him, he was in space, if he even existed. I didn't want to turn around. I just stayed frozen, not even blinking and holding my breath. I yelped when I felt something poke me.

"Chell, are you okay?" Gladys's voice said this time. I exhaled deeply. I turned to look at her and I saw how scared she looked. Scared for me.

"I-I'm fine." I said, I knew I wasn't. I was shaking and couldn't focus on anything. My eyes darted around the room, looking for something that made sense. It was still normal. Of course it would be normal. I was the only strange thing there. And it made no sense. I'd always thought of myself as normal, in Aperture I was.

"You are not fine, what's wrong? You look like you've seen a ghost or something." Her voice was filled with concern. I couldn't tell her about it though, it would make no sense to her, I'd have to explain everything. Something I didn't have the energy for. I just shook my head and waved my hand, I for once didn't want someone to care or worry about me. It just caused problems.

"I won't pursue if you don't want me to." She patted me on the back and left the room again. Out of all things outside, it was her that made me wonder if it was real or not. As I thought that I felt a sudden surge of pain through my body, after all I'd gone through I had a pretty good tolerance to pain but that random bout of it hurt like hell. I still kept my mouth shut. I didn't want Gladys to worry at this moment. I just waited until it had passed and went downstairs.

"I know you don't want to talk about anything but you really look... well awful." Gladys informed me. I felt worse than I looked. Probably. I sat at the table, drumming my fingers to try and distract myself.

"Can I have food?" I asked. She was already preparing that and set a bowl in front of me with cereal in it. I wasn't very hungry but I needed something to do when I wasn't driving myself crazy trying to think of reasons for everything.

"Wake up, Chell." Gladys's voice said but she didn't move her lips. This was just scaring me more and more. It was also helping to reinforce the idea that this was not real. But it seemed more real than anything. I wanted it to be real. I heard the same words spoken again, just in GLaDOS's voice this time.

"Can you hear anything? Can you hear another voice talking?" I asked and I could hear the fear in my own voice. I also sounded crazy. She probably thought I was. I excused myself before she could give me an answer and walked out of the house and to the shed again. Maybe it disguised itself around her. With Aperture anything is possible.

I was stood outside the shed and felt nervous again but I let myself open the door. I had my eyes closed as I did, somewhat afraid of what would be inside. I opened my eyes and inside I saw nothing. But literally nothing this time. Just emptiness.

And I walked into it.

And I fell. I fell a long way, and for a long time.

But then I suddenly stopped, and the nothingness started to turn light. And I heard a voice and beeping and the blood rushing in my ears.

And it just kept getting lighter.

And I felt dead.

But then I woke up.

"Chell, wake up, you're scaring me." I heard two voices say at the same time. The voices belonged to GLaDOS and Gladys. But the face I saw was Gladys's.

"What...?" Was all I said before she put a finger to my lips to silence me.

"Just rest, then we can both explain what happened." She smiled gently and patted my shoulder, she was visibly shaking as she did. Resting was the last thing I wanted to do. I didn't want to see nothing but darkness again, whatever had happened was terrifying and only made things more confusing. And it nearly confirmed that this place was not real, but why I was in it, that was still a mystery.

**Author's Note: This chapter isn't as long as I wanted it to be, but this was the best I could do with what was supposed to happen. Hopefully next chapter will be longer and will clear things up, tell me what you think of this. Or what you think is going on because for once I actually know. Thanks for reading, and shout out to my first favourite from ****xXRose-the-MagicatXx****, it's things like that that keep me writing.**


End file.
